Dealing with Depression
As you might have been able to glean from yesterday morning’s post, I find myself in a bit of a funk on those days when I have to drive up to Yale for follow up care. I woke up feeling a bit nauseous, unsettled, and yeah, depressed. Happens every time.
But I’m not alone. Up to one-third of women diagnosed with breast cancer face some type of mood disorders. It’s no wonder — chemotherapy and hormone therapy wreak havoc on our natural hormone levels, and hormone fluctuations affect our mood. We’re facing our mortality every day. We’re stressed and tired and uncertain and frightened … I’d be surprised if you sailed through cancer without a little depression.
But you shouldn’t roll over and let cancer get the best of you or your mood. In particular, if you’re a mom, you need to get help for the sake of your children; research indicates that children of depressed breast cancer patients are more likely to be concerned or anxious about their mother’s cancer and its implication for their families. Your babies need you to be strong.
Here’s what you should do if the breast cancer blues are beating down your door:
- Contact your medical team and ask them to refer you to an oncology social worker on their staff. They can coordinate your appointments with the social worker’s schedule and really work to help heal your entire body as a team.
- Talk openly about your disease with others — the positive spin you’ll likely want to put on it for their sakes will benefit your own psyche as well. Plus, it’s therapeutic to share those negative emotions. Purge them, get them out, so you can put all the energy you can muster up towards your treatment. Got nobody? Comment here or on an online support site like breastcancer.org.
- Get yourself to a support group or at least peer counseling, either at your medical institution or through an organization like Y-Me or the American Cancer Society. (Here’s a post listing Ten Reasons to Join a Support Group, FYIl)
- At the very least … talk openly with a medical professional about what you’re feeling because they can prescribe medication to help manage your mental distress. This is not the time to be too proud, or too vain. Get help. Nobody should go into battle without a fully loaded arsenal. If you already take something, tell them it’s not working. They need to know.
What are some of the ways you all fight depression when it hits?
1 opinion for Dealing with Depression
Alicia Sparks, NAMI Affiliation Leader
May 10, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Great article, Karen! I wish I’d known about it sooner, I would have included it in this week’s Saturday Sanity at Mental Health Notes! I’ll bookmark it and add it in next week’s.
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